Spam in mailbox has gone down but non-useful new accounts at
Advogato seem to be on the rise. I don't know if this is due
to their appreciation of Google-juice or due to most real people
posting indirectly through syndication, so that they don't
see it happening. Having said that, the system for flagging
annoyances is a big help.

I realised that I don't read language descriptions for fun
any more. This occurred to me when I was writing a little
script for my TI-89 Titanium and the syntax for statistical
functions was a little bit unexpected. I didn't know this
ahead of time because I didn't RTFM in advance. In contrast
I have warm
and fuzzy
memories of a younger me going to the library checking out
programming
manuals for Fortran, ALGOL and PL/I even though I had no
real access to any kind of computing resources to try them
out. The nearest I could do at the time was to fill out
programming forms with BASIC code and hand them in at school
to be mailed off to be typed in to an ICL 2900 Series
machine, that we were never able to see. I liked reading
those old manuals and in my untutored way I could see the
strengths and weaknesses of the languages. I continued
reading with Jensen & Wirth's Pascal book (and Wirth's
Programming in Modula-2), Leo Brodie's Forth books
and Clocksin & Mellish on Prolog. Naturally K&R was easy
and compulsory reading.

Now I realise that I don't
read manuals
for fun any more. I think that this is due to a mixture of
recent languages being *big* (there are way too many ways to
do things), the availability of electronic help (contextual
or through the internet) and because I am older, impatient and
more pragmatic. With small languages like C differences in
code implementation are more at the algorithmic level
(flamewars on brace style notwithstanding) whereas bigger
languages have many options to write essentially the same
code. This makes bigger languages more for lone coders as
they are somewhat write-only (unless institutions force you
to use a particular style or your coding partner is your
conjoined twin).

This lack of pre-reading was probably
exacerbated by my target
for today being my TI-89 Titanium. No context-sensitive
help there.
Graphical calculators are also somewhat schizophrenic as
they are simultaneously trying to be a fully fledged
computer you can hold in your hand, but also a simple little
calculator where functionality is intuitive and you never
have to look at a book. Some people think that these calculators
will go the way of the sliderule as they are replaced by
netbooks and smartphones but I like the challenge of
optimising my code so that it takes less than a minute to
run. I'm not so much of a junkie that I'm programming with
TIGCC or M68k assembler but I have fun. I also don't know
whether
the designer of this calculator should be shot or praised as
the key labeling is illegible under dim or fluorescent light
(GAR!) but this means my muscle memory has been forced to
improve so now I almost never have to look for the [2ND] or
[DIAMOND] functions. Anyway, I should have realised that a
calculator with a built-in algebra system would be happiest
being told that ranges can stretch to +/-infinity. Instead I
watched my mis-implemented code fail when it crossed a
particular boundary. It doesn't help that the TISTATLE
functions seem to be happiest when called from the List
Editor rather than used in a program and the documentation
for them is fairly sparse. But it is available...